Tuesday, March 5, 2013

First Things First: Nutrition Basics.

Last post I talked at length about how to
prepare yourself mentally—which is much more important than most bodybuilding
programs say—to begin your transformation. Now, moving on, I need to say there really
aren’t any secrets to getting big so you won’t find here the recipe to the
Magical and Secret Megahulk Elixir ™, mainly because there isn’t one. However,
what you will find here is a good
outline of the most important thing people take too long to understand, or
never do, and give up on bodybuilding blaming their body or some similar
bullshit.

I’m talking about nutrition, a word often wrongfully equaled with diet, a word often wrongfully equaled
with getting a hot fire poker in the
urethra. It’s not that. Nutrition basically just means feeding your muscles
so they can grow after being exercised. To understand this better, let me
explain the process of hypertrophy (that’s “muscle growth” in Fancy) in the
simplest of terms.

Flex your arm. So maybe your arm is small
and weak, but right now you need to ask yourself this: why the hell should it not be small and weak? Your arms have
never before needed size or strength so why the hell would they grow? It’s not
like they’re ever going to need to pick up heavy stuff, right? Your body has
absolutely no reason to think it needs strength.

Remember 6th grade biology when Mrs. Price talked about some dude’s
observation of some birds in some island and came up with the theory of
evolution? Basically we learned that living organisms adapt to their
environment in order to survive. How the hell does the body know how to adapt
and to what?

But really, organisms know how to adapt and
to what when they find themselves with particular needs. When giraffes needed
long necks to reach them tall leaves so they wouldn’t die, they developed
longer necks through a painfully slow process. Of course this is an extreme
example, but it leads to where I’m going:

You
need to trick your body into thinking it needs to adapt, or evolve, by becoming
bigger and stronger.

You do this by working out. Your body can’t
tell the difference between you lifting a pair of dumbbells for the lulz or you
pushing a rock out of your way in order to reach a drink of water. If your body
thinks being stronger is necessary for you to not die, and it has the resources to do it, it will become stronger. You need to
capitalize on this concept, which is where the concept of “surprising your
muscles” comes from. I’ll get to that eventually.

Those resources I’m talking about up there
are, basically, the nutrients found in food. You can have the most brutal
workout the word has ever known, the kind that would make your body think that
you just straight up fought and murdered a wooly mammoth to feed your family,
but if you don’t feed your muscles with the nutrients they need, you know what
will happen?

Fuck. All.

This is why so many people go to the gym
for months, cry, sweat and bleed on the machines, and don’t see any changes in
their bodies. Trying to build muscle without eating enough food is like paying
fifty dudes to build your house, but not supply them with bricks.

Yes. You need food. More than anything, you
need food. Now if you go ask an expert—id est, someone who knows his shit
better than I do—what kind of diet you should take on if your goal is
bulking—bulking (getting big), as opposed to cutting (getting rid of fat), more
on this later—they’ll give you some complicated numbers that will probably make
your head spin at first.

Luckily for you, your goal is becoming huge
and to become huge, you just need to eat like a monster. Of course, you need to
eat the right foods, but don’t bother yourself with the minutiae of
nutrition—it’s not important right now. Measuring your food and counting
calories is for when you want to cut fat. Right now your body is so desperate
to grow it’ll take any decent diet as an excuse to do so.

But let’s not leave it at “decent”. Let’s
make a good diet for you in four easy steps.

How To Prepare Your “Phase One” Diet.

Step
One. Determine your BMR.

First, you need to figure out your Basal
Metabolic Rate (BMR). This basically determines the rough amount of calories
your body burns every day. There is no math involved, here, don’t worry. Just
go to this calculator here, fill it up, and write the number it gives you. Pro
tip: bookmark this because this is a process you’ll have to do more than once.

Step
Two. Determine your daily intake.

You have your BMR now. I’m guessing it’s
around 2,000 calories? Anyway, you will plot a diet that will give your body
more nutrients than it naturally burns; adding this to a workout plan that
kicks your muscles’ ass at the gym will only give your body one choice: use the
excess nutrients to grow.

Boom. You just became an X-Man. Choose your mutant name.

"Beast" has been taken twice. Watch it.

To grow, you need to add ~500 calories to
your BMR, so take that number and add 500. If it was 2,000, we now know that
you need to eat 2,500 calories every day
to grow. Sounds scary? Too much? It’s not, don’t worry.

Step
Three. Determine your meal plan.

You’re probably eating three meals a day
like a normal human being. Well, you’re not a normal human being anymore,
motherfucker, you’re a bodybuilder, and
bodybuilders don’t eat three meals a day like puny humans do!

No. You’re going to eat at least five times
a day. Don’t freak out quite yet, though. It’s not as scary as it sounds. It’ll
actually make your life so much easier (since a lot of your life now is
eating). At your current BMR, eating five meals means having to eat around 500
calories each.

So are you still on board? At this point
you need to eat 5 meals of 500 calories each to grow. This is very, very
manageable. Naturally being more active and heavier will mean having to eat
more calories a day, so wait until you’re huge and need to pack in ~4,000
calories to get bigger.

Step
Four. Determine your meals.

Pictured: you.

2,500 calories a day? Easy! Just two trips
to McDonalds and we’re set! Well no, sorry. Naturally it’s 2,500 calories of
the right food. Here’s how you find
out the right foods: nutrients are largely divided into three groups:
carbohydrates, protein and fats. Only one of those sounds friendly (the
almighty protein), but truth is we need all three of them. Oh, and here’s the
twist:

Protein isn’t the one you’ll be eating the
most. Nope. It’s carbohydrates. That’s right. You’re going to be eating nearly twice
as many carbs as you eat proteins. Sounds crazy? It’s not. In fact, this is how
you’re going to ratio your food:

50% should be carbs.

30% should be protein.

20% should be fats.

This means that at 2,500 calories, 1,250
should come from carbs; 750 should come from proteins; 500 should come from
fats. You do your own math.

Knowing what food belongs to what group is
tricky at first, luckily there are a billionresources online, not to mention
apps for your phone as reference guides, to help you through. Still, I’ll give you a quick summary
to give you a broad idea: carbs are fruit, vegetables, pasta, bread; protein is
beef, chicken, fish, dairy; fats are seeds, nuts, olive oil, fish oil, etc.I recommend for this "Phase One", that you focus at least one protein heavy meal to take it right after your workout. As soon as you can without throwing up.Another thing that is important is that, although you need to keep a surplus of calories, you need to watch out and don't overindulge in certain foods. You might be aware that muscles grow through protein, but you need to know that a surplus of protein will not result in a surplus of muscle. Sadly:Your body can only process about 2 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight a day.If you take more than that it'll just end up packed into a neat brown trunk floating in your toilet.A word on cheat meals:

You can imagine what "Cheat meals" means. It means a meal in which you cheat on your diet with a sexier diet, one that generally consists of greasy but delicious shit. As a skinny guy, you can get away with shit other people can't, but you shouldn't indulge too much. I recommend having only three or four cheat meals a week.

No wait, I don't recommend. I encourage it. Cheat meals are great mainly because if taken carefully, they don't work against your growth and they work in favor of your determination. Psychologically, it's very important to have the reassurance that, even if you have to eat this dry chicken breast right now, maybe in two days you'll be able to eat a motherfucking Royale with cheese. Until then, hold the desire; it'll make it taste better.

So there you have it. This is all you need
to know to begin. Figure out your meal plan, buy the correct foods you’ll need
(I’ll make a post about bodybuilding on a budget later), and get ready.